One Writer on Visiting the 9/11 Memorial and the Cult of Collective Memory

It took ten years to get my father to New York City. The plan for his visit, last May, almost a decade after my removal from Toronto to Brooklyn, became credible only when I saw him installed in a restaurant near my apartment, where we awaited my older brother’s arrival on a later flight.

For weeks I had fevered over an itinerary balancing entertainment and illumination, museums and Letterman tickets, preparing to lead a small pack through the place I now called home. The first morning, I offered a sole piece of advice as I drew my family into the arterial flow of bodies, the endless valves, blockages, and more bodies, in hopes of endearing to them the cellular logic of the city: Don’t hesitate.

Their only request for the weekend led the agenda: a visit to the Freedom Tower and the 9/11 Memorial. It is a trip I have avoided, with some vehemence, over my years spent living here and before. Having postponed for a few weeks a mid-September 2001 flight to New York, I was joined for the trip by my mother, who wished to add to our schedule of restaurants and theater a visit to “ground zero.” She went alone, while I brooded with friends over the meaning of such a wish, whether good intentions mattered—or were possible—when gazing into a still-smoldering abyss.

I was very young then, among the millions who sat dazed during the hours and days and weeks following the attacks before the repeating images of the planes, the explosions, the collapse. After some years, I found that the same images, now appearing with what always feels like insufficient warning, would strike out like a blow.

Today I live across from a Brooklyn fire company and watch (or more often, listen) as the young men race from its garage each day. One afternoon they poured into my building, up to an apartment streaming dark smoke from windows that soon rained glass into the courtyard. In the weeks leading up to the tenth anniversary of the attacks, a kid in saggy jeans stood on a box, painting the company’s garage doors with fiery skulls. On the morning of the anniversary, I rose early, zipped up a cotton dress, and crossed the street to watch the men in their dress blues receive the blessing of a local priest.

I hesitated that day, unsure of whether to stand with or respectfully apart from my fellow New Yorkers. It was a public ritual fraught with private, immeasurable sorrow. Some version of this hesitation has shown itself, down the years, to recent days, in the dissent over how to mourn and memorialize the day’s catastrophic losses.

Before the opening of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, family members of some victims lined the route along which three metal coffin-size cases bearing thousands of unidentified remains were transferred, via city vehicles, from the Manhattan medical examiner’s office to a repository within the museum building. Some were satisfied with what Mayor **Bill de Blasio’**s office called the “ceremonial transfer”; others wore black gags, a symbol of their disgust that victim remains might help advertise a ghoulish “dog and pony show,” the tourist attraction taking shape on the site of a tragedy.

Museum planners chose to inscribe the wall behind which the remains would rest with a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” Three years ago, the announcement of the decision to quote from a passage that mourns two bloody-minded Trojan warriors, themselves freshly beheaded, was called “grotesque” and “disastrous.” Today, key chains bearing the Virgil inscription are for sale in the museum’s gift shop. In context, classics scholars noted, the line applies more readily to the hijackers, who believed themselves engaged in a holy war, than to their unsuspecting victims. It would appear a different contextual problem, a persistent lack of reference for an attack that meant war as surely as the terms of the resulting conflicts have proven elusive, has boggled more than a decade’s efforts to rebuild and dedicate the site.

When Maya Lin was asked to explain why her spare, antithetical design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial had generated so much acrimony, she replied: “I think, in a sense, it’s a part of the Vietnam controversy that’s carried on. And you could probably take almost any design, submit it, and it would evoke the same emotions.” Lin’s design, a gentle, sloping “V” cut from black granite, foregrounds the names of the almost sixty thousand dead. No flags, no statues, no traditional nods to glory, but a space, as memorial founder Jan Scruggs later put it, “for the living and the dead to meet.” The Vietnam memorial is now credited with shaping a new way to remember a new kind of war. It seemed to gather within it and then, over time, help release, together with the private grief of so many, a nation’s anger and bewilderment.

The evocation of Lin’s design in that of the 9/11 memorial was much noted on the 2011 opening of the latter to the public. Again the names of the dead take precedence, carved into bronze panels, the order and display of the names having once more caused much debate.

I can’t tell you a lot more about the memorial; we didn’t make it there that drizzly Saturday. The plan had been fair, if not flawless. We walked into the city, over the Brooklyn Bridge, admiring the view and exchanging the occasional obscenity with a cyclist. From there we continued across lower Manhattan, to where the Freedom Tower stood incomplete. My dad and brother, now bearing hastily purchased bodega umbrellas, had done well, and in their company I felt surer, somehow. On moving toward the memorial, though, the three of us were instantly caught up. Having the least excuse, I was the most troubled by this. I don’t know the area, I kept saying, but even logic was working against us. I had imagined an intuitive, public, perhaps even peaceful space, which was my first error, or instance of magical thinking, for we had entered a maze of barriers, fencing, and painted chipboard walls. Eventually a ticket office was determined, outside which a mass of people had puddled over into the street. The atmosphere was frenetic, the sidewalks teeming with disoriented civilians flatly oppressive, unavailable for big city metaphor.

Several blocks down, we discovered the lineup for the memorial, and lingered alongside it for a while, seeking advice from the most obviously accomplished tourists. The barriers stood covetously tall, as though something sensational lay beyond them. Sadness began to infect me, and dismay. We decided against the wait and the security searches, and so our sense of baffled repellence carried the experience.

As of this spring, tickets to the memorial, which were free but difficult to come by (reserving online carried a two dollar fee) in the years after its opening, are no longer required. Tickets to the newly opened museum cost twenty-four dollars each, among the highest price of any New York City museum, and certainly any national memorial site. A lack of federal funds is cited as the reason for the expense, a detail perhaps less surprising upon recalling that the Vietnam memorial was petitioned not by Washington but private citizens in a veteran-led effort.

A major city with a desperate wound in its midst presents another problem of context. For many reasons and many years, the mourning could only and could not possibly happen here, a metropolis of relentless speed and bounty, yet whose commercial interests gnaw at its insides with rodent teeth. Detachment can be a matter of survival, and a stubborn habit to break.

At last, the work nears completion. In the coming decades, the memorial will attract an untold number of Americans and foreigners with a love of this country who, like me, seek to close the gap between then and now, the living and the dead, and to find some more reconciled way forward. Those millions, and no bitterly fought detail of design or bureaucracy, will ultimately define the space, its role in the story.

It is a reckoning, it seems to me, which will only begin on the day, as yet undetermined, when the people can finally reclaim the site, infuse it freely and without hesitation, as they do the rest of this proud city, with the flow of life.

Michelle Orange is the author of This Is Running for Your Life: Essays_._